Brooklyn students stranded on Florida highway for 8 hours

More than 100 high school students are back in Brooklyn Tuesday morning after a long trip home from Florida.

The Fort Hamilton High School students were stranded for hours along the side of an interstate in Orlando after one of the group's buses broke down early Monday morning.

School officials on the trip decided to keep the students together and wait for a replacement bus, but it took eight hours for one to show up.

"As soon as it broke down, everything went off," one student said when they arrived home. "The AC went off, the bus broke down, the outlets went out, so you couldn't charge your phone to tell anybody anything. It was just terrible."

They spent the night on their buses, stranded after the bus broke down following a weekend trip to Disney World for Festival Disney, a field trip for school bands, orchestras and concert choirs.

"It's frustrating, because we've been here all night without sleep wondering when the bus is coming," assistant principal Tom Oberle said.

Oberle says he wanted to keep the students together and says parents have been calling concerned about their children.

"The frustrations are...I felt like when I called dispatch, I didn't get any answers as far as when they were sending a new bus," he said.

The bus broke down along I-4 east near SR 535, and when the replacement finally arrived nearly nine hours later, students scrambled to load up.